Peter Dreier

Few progressive activists under 60 will know the name Dorothy Healey -- who died yesterday at age 91 -- but she was a remarkable organizer and activist. Tiny in stature, she was a charismatic and inspiring speaker, a feisty firebrand with a great sense of humor, who began her activism as a teenager and persisted through her late 80s. The obituary in today's (Tuesday's) LA Times is reasonably thorough, but doesn't really capture the energy and enthusiasm that was so forceful and contagious. Even people (like myself) who disagreed with some of her political views - she was a leader of the LA branch of the Communist Party from the 1940s through the 1960s -- learned a great deal from her organizing skills and her lifetime commitment to social, economic and racial justice. Like her colleague Frank Wilkinson, who died last year, she was a long distance runner for progressive change. I haven't made contact with her son Richard yet, but I assume there will be an LA memorial event for her at some point.

Here's what my coauthors (Bob Gottlieb, Regina Freer, and Mark Vallianatos) and I wrote about Dorothy in our book, The Next Los Angeles:

"Perhaps more than any other figure, Dorothy Healey spanned the city's progressive movement from the l930s through the l970s. As a teenager and Communist Party member in 1933, Healey helped organize the Mexican and Japanese berry pickers in El Monte. As head of the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party after 1946, she helped build bridges between unions, civil rights movements, and progressive electoral coalitions. During the Red Scare, she was one of the original Smith Act defendants, tried, arrested, and jailed until the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.

During the mid- and late- 1950s, Healey re-emerged as an effective behind-the-scenes figure in the efforts to create new grassroots coalitions of progressive Democrats, such as the California Democratic Council and Californians for Liberal Representation. While the U.S. Community Party never recovered from its association with the Soviet Union (particularly after the 1956 Khrushchev speech attacking Stalinism and the Hungarian uprising), the Los Angeles party under Healey's leadership was able, to a certain extent, to maintain its roots within the larger LA progressive community. A 1959 Municipal Program for Los Angeles, issued by the local party, was indicative of its desire to focus on local issues, although it continued to position its local agenda as secondary to its international perspective on Cold War issues, including support for the Soviet Union.

Healey's subsequent disenchantment with the Soviet Union, culminating in her opposition to the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, ultimately led her to quit the Communist Party in 1973. However, she continued her political activism through participation in the New Left-oriented the New American Movement as well as by hosting a current events program on KPFK radio. Through her continuing work, Healey became one of the few "Old Left" activists who helped mentor a new generation of "New Left" activists and progressives. Like Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, and Charlotta Bass before her, she became a link between progressive movements and across political generations."

Peter

_________________________

Peter Dreier

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics

Director, Urban & Environmental Policy Program

Occidental College

1600 Campus Road

Los Angeles, CA 90041

Phone: (323) 259-2913

FAX: (323) 259-2734